When I’m TBM I must admit that I don’t eat as well as during the rest of the year, when Eleanor is here to cook. But it’s an opportunity to eat like a bachelor, and believe it or not that’s not entirely bad. It inspires independent thinking, for one thing.
Sure, the blueberry/chocolate smoothie wasn’t my biggest success (nor the caramel/bacon smoothie). And my annual survey of Tucson’s Sonoran hot dog stands (ongoing at the moment) is a health fanatic’s nightmare. It doesn’t matter. The essence of TBM is trying new things, following sudden inspirations, and taking small risks to uncover the answers to questions nobody cares to ask.
This can encompass culinary topics as well as almost anything else. For example, which is the best zombie movie of the past few decades? The only to be sure is to watch as many of them as you can. I personally favor old-school classics like “Omega Man” with Charlton Heston and Anthony Zerbe, but I recognize I may be in the minority with that choice. More recently “Shaun of The Dead” with Simon Pegg & Nick Frost could be a contender for its relative originality, and I think “I Am Legend” with Will Smith deserves a vote.
As you might be able to tell, I’m not a huge fan of the straight horror-style zombie flicks filled with shuffling idiots. I like the ones with something new to push the theme forward, while respecting the genre. To keep my research complete, Rob and I went out to see a late showing of “World War Z” last week. I thought it failed to have a good plot climax, but it was good to see that the movie industry is still revisiting this tried-and-true theme. Zombie movies are sort of self-mocking, since the movies themselves are often “undead” versions of those that came before.
Another aspect of TBM has been the traditional buying of an unnecessary car. I haven’t blogged all the cars I’ve bought over the past few years, but basically I seem to find one every year or so, and then sell them a year or two later after sorting them out. The green Mercedes 300D was only bought last fall and I am planning to keep it for a long time, so I told Eleanor I would not break with tradition and not buy a car this summer—and then promptly discovered a flashy red Miata at an estate sale and put a bid in on it. To be fair, I called her first and she encouraged this irresponsibility, because she wants it for herself! (I lowballed the bid so we probably won’t get it anyway.)
At the same sale I found a Sunbeam Mixmaster Model 12 (made from 1957-1967) in fairly good condition. Eleanor already has a Mixmaster Model 9 (late 1940s) that was handed down through her family, which she still uses regularly. We thought the Model 12’s beaters might be interchangeable with the Model 9 beaters, but as it turns out the Model 12 won’t release the beaters at all. I’m going to have to take it apart to fix that problem, and while I’m in there I’ll clean up the gears and motor parts, and re-lube it with new food-grade synthetic grease.
Two Mixmasters is really more than we can use, so I’m not sure what we will do with the Model 12 after I’ve fixed it up. Right now I’m admiring it as a great example of durable American mid-century mechanical design. It just looks good sitting there, and it’s amazing to me that these old machines still work as well as they do after fifty or sixty years in the kitchen. It’s also neat that they are still so inexpensive and easy to find, despite being antiques. I paid $22 for this one complete with beaters and two original milk-white glass bowls, all in good condition.
These Mixmasters are analogous to my Mercedes W123: built in abundance, well-designed, long-lasting and hence beloved. In a way they represent a pinnacle of engineering, because they achieved everything that could be hoped for at the time. I wonder if the builders knew that they’d created things that would not be surpassed for durability by anything to follow.
I really like things like that, machines that are timeless in both design and function. I’m not a fan of disposable industrial design. “Disposable” is for Kleenex. This bias is probably most of the reason why we have Airstreams, too. Of all the things we own, the mid-century products are the ones I respect the most.
The machine that makes my smoothies is another antique, a Sunbeam Vista blender from the 1960s. When it just keeps working for decades, why replace it? In that vein, we recently acquired the final bits we need to install a NuTone Food Center in the Airstream Safari. The NuTones are highly sought by some RV owners because they are designed to be mounted in the countertop (thus saving valuable space when not in use).
We had one in our 1977 Argosy 24 known as “Vintage Thunder,” and kept most of the accessories that we’d collected for it. The NuTone motor is permanently mounted under the counter, and you just pop whatever appliance you want on the power head at the countertop: blender, coffee grinder, juicer, mixer, food processor/slicer, knife sharpener, etc. Collecting the accessories is easy on eBay but the prices tend to be high these days because they’re out of production. Our final piece was the motor base, and we got one of those from David Winick at Alumapalooza. I plan to install it over the next winter, when I’ve got to get under the kitchen countertop to re-fasten it anyway.
Speaking of Airstreams kitchens, the Caravel’s new dinette table has been cut. The dimensions are identical to the current table, but by using solid poplar instead of plywood/ash/Marmoleum, it is 8.1 pounds lighter (23.1 lbs). That may not seem like a lot, but it makes a huge difference. We’ve trimmed the weight by 26%, enough to allow one person to heave it out of the wall mounting bracket and convert it to a bed without help. And it looks better already. Neither Eleanor nor I were crazy about chunky look of the previous table.
I’ve got to let the wood settle for a few days before I proceed with sanding, shaping, finish, and hardware, so for now it’s just resting flat on the floor of the living room. It may also require a little bracing underneath to ensure that the table never warps. I’ll get to that over the next few weeks.
In the meantime, I’ve had a chance to contemplate why it matters to me to fine-tune the Caravel, a trailer that we hardly ever use and are seriously over-invested in. It’s really for the same reason that I’ll take two hours to disassemble an old kitchen mixer that we really don’t need, and carefully clean & lube it so that it can work as designed for another few decades.
You could look on it as a form of recycling, but it’s more than that. The 1948 Sunbeam Mixmaster Model 9, the 1968 Caravel, the 1971 General Electric P7 oven, the 1984 Mercedes 300D, and the 1970s era NuTone could all be replaced by modern equivalents, but none would be as durable, or as inspirational to me. These things seem to deserve attention and respect and repair.
They were made to last, in part because they were built in a time when “value” meant more than lowest price. More importantly, they have lasted, proving their designer’s principles were correct. If you want to make a product today that will last for ages, you don’t need to guess the future—you only need to respect good design. Not to get too romantic about it, but those few antique machines we still use and value prove that great principles endure.
Just like zombie movies.
